OpenWrt 86x obstacles

I'm looking forward to try this out. Thanks guys

Wooooop woooop I'm up running eth ports are working smooth.

Next task is to install a wireless PCI card. Is that possible ?

Yes that's possible, if the card has a supported chipset. The kmods for the card as well as the rest of the 802.11 stack leading down to hostapd/wpad will need to be installed manually. No wireless programs are included in the default build.

But this time I can install from the gui - right ...no broadcom chipsets

If you figure out what's a good wireless PCI card, let us know :wink:

You might want to look at a separate wifi access point rather than a PCI card. You can position an access point at a physical location where it will have good line of site to the clients, not stuck behind the case of your machine in a corner. You also will find that for the most part they're better performance even when in less than ideal locations, because they're purpose designed as access points with proper multi-antenna arrays etc.

Putting an access point attached to a wall or ceiling instead of in a corner behind a metal box might easily double your coverage distance.

Yes you are right the pci might not be the best solution and the antennas..do you have an ubiquiti....they look not that stupid :wink:

I like the UAP-AC-LR for indoor applications. Almost any old router, even one that only runs stock firmware, can be pressed into service as an AP and is likely to outperform a PCI card.

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I keep looking at the EAP225 from TP-Link, but basically I have two OpenWrt wireless devices that I'm trying to milk until the next generation of such access points, with WiFi6 / 6GHz so I'm not buying/trying things now. On the other hand my wife keeps complaining about the wifi dropping her because I'm running the WRT3200 which has not great drivers... so if the boss says, I will probably do two EAP225s.

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Longe range is that 300 meters? I have a small :house: house.... Well I can supply the neighbors..

The wifi boos :wink: but wifi 6 is not stable yet....takes years doesn't it?

That is of course best case. One of these can thoroughly cover the interior of a small to medium size house, if the walls are not highly attenuative. Walls, furniture, trees, groups of people, vehicles, etc. cause a lot of loss especially to 5 GHz.

You don't need a large house to outgrow the capabilities of a single AP, signals are quickly extenunated by internal walls and floors (especially floors). For this to happen it's not even necessary that you don't get any signal at all, after all you often need a certain 'guaranteed' minimum throughput (over the range), to sustain your use case (e.g. video/ audio streaming, for VoIP you need to keep latencies and packet loss at bay). The vendor's range estimates are usually very optimistic - even for the case they apply to (clear line of sight, no interference or anything inbetween).

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But I can't find the eap 225 with an s....I can't find just eap 225 or the 245

sorry the s was just plural because I probably would get 2 or 3 of them. The EAP225 version 3 seems like good value for the money.

I got one eap 245 very easy to setup....the v3 looks not that bad.

Wiregaurd vpn seams to be working but I'm a little confused about the watchdog.sh if that's working.

I have been trying to mount hdd ssd and USB -that works in the gui. But the samba network seems to struggle me. It does not show up in Luci - no network setup. I think the guides for this is in many directions.

I can't install luci-app-samba. Does any have an easy guide for setting up samba in the gui? Or another way to use the drives over the network.

This part is not so important but it could be nice to have storage here and get use for old drives.

The last thing that I would like is a powerful firewall that can take care of virus and malware - something like the pfsense or unify dream machine. Has anyone done that on the open wrt.

I'm not that far from the goal - thanks to the forum!

how is the coverage? did you use more than one ssid? VLANs?

I'm not sure what this means. The firewall of OpenWrt, out of the box is secure by design. But firewalls don't "take care of" viruses and malware. they filter network packets. Don't change the firewall unless you have specific goals in mind.

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On the table it's okay. I use only 5ghz. I will test it when it's on the ceiling.

I would like something like the usg unify firewall but the speed drops to 85 when turn it on.

Threat Management Modes

  • Intrusion Detection System: When set will automatically detect, and alert, but will not block potentially malicious traffic.
  • Intrusion Prevention System: When set will automatically detect, alert, and block potentially malicious traffic.

So I ask for a IPS firewall.

Intrusion detection and prevention is a cpu intensive process. If you really want that you need to look at snort or suricata. Configuring those is well outside the scope of the openwrt message boards, a few people probably know something but it'd be best to use the community for your chosen method.

If I were interested in that I would look to run it on dedicated machine with port mirroring on a switch

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Tp-link EAP225v3 and EAP245v3 both support some wifi roaming standards using default firmware with centralized controller software (Omada controller). Still much up to the client when it comes to roaming, I know smallnetbuilder has good articles about it.

And I find the omada controllers mobile app to be quite nice.

What would be the benefit of flashing these tp-link APs with openwrt?

nothing, they aren't supported by openwrt